One's truth is always mute and is communicated in silence when genuinely expressed. If one has to speak, what results is the translation of that silence into pictures, music, dance and other creative acts – personal, social and institutional. Every dream is a plan that lends itself to enactment in the outside world; behind every passage in the outside world, there is a dream – or a picture, a note, a movement, a thought, an idea, or perhaps something that is only waiting for discovery. This universality of creativity binds us all in a shared journey of expression and discovery.
Keats said, "That which is creative must create itself."Creativity arises from itself; you can’t learn, explain, or teach it. It comes upon one and creates stillness and a presence where the images and colours take on their own life. One becomes obsessed with it, creating an urgency and demanding satisfaction. One cannot avoid it; it will always need doing.
Before discussing this, I would like to add some things James Hillman says are not.
We like to think that every child is filled with creative potential that is extinguished by parental control so that, as adults, we go around feeling that there is a book inside if only we could get it out. Self-expression of personal ideas and emotions does not necessarily go hand in hand with creativity, which goes beyond the individual. The test lies in how relevant it is to the collective mind.
The second mistake is to think that creativity is linked only to art, music, and drama, which ignores the rest of creativity, which manifests in business and technology. Creativity releases itself in many fields of activity. People ask me, “Why do you have a business when you can paint?" The answer is simple: creating an organisation is a creative act, and each relationship can be creative.
Confusion also equates creativity with production, creating objects that can be judged. Creativity is an end in itself. Just being in "it" is enough. Instead, like meditation, the presence is enough for me. With painting, I get the added benefit of the image and the colours forming from the silence. Musicians experience the same process as dancers, actors, etc.
Creativity also needs not to be confused with the word "good." All creativity is not good—one only has to think of the atom bomb. The confusion of goodness comes from thinking and believing that everything that God creates is good—therefore, if we make it, then we are mimicking an act of God; consequently, it must be good. Creativity can also be destructive. It can also have a dual face. With painting, one needs to harness both sides: creativity and destruction.
Creativity must have a personal "I " that does the creating. However, the "I” has to be set aside, or at least not be in the way. At an art group, we were encouraged to walk around with our pictures and say after the experience -“I did that. I painted this.” But this owning comes after the event, part of the communication process that has nothing to do with creativity. It is part of the selling process, which is narrow and oppressive and focuses on the product. Creativity happens unobserved and without judgment. If creativity relied on judgment, it would have to rely on the personal ego- the observer who is judging – and this process would be destructive. Here, the observer and the observation are one. There is unity and no duality. Duality comes after the act; it is not part of the process. The original vision is where one needs to start from.
Different artworks also help impregnate other works of creativity. For example, I listen to music, which helps set off a hot spark. I dance—one image, whether music, sculpture, or art, will set off another spark. Creativity builds upon itself and pressures one to move to the subsequent work.
Getting in touch with the imagination and the little people (internal objects) inhabiting it is like dreaming; the images can do as they please. By 'little people (internal objects) ', I refer to the various aspects of our psyche, such as our emotions, memories, and subconscious thoughts and dream images. One has to trust the voices, the images, and the sounds and allow them to come from themselves and not control what you want them to say. It is like a dream. One is always a player in a group, sometimes an observer and at other times taking command. Other people in the group are also of value. So, what comes first in a painting may be a partial image, as one has to allow different images to speak for themselves. This may involve destroying what was created initially to enable creativity to reform and recreate itself. In painting a picture, this process can go on over and over again, so one learns that the act of creation is also one of destruction. The creator and the destroyer work hand in hand. One has to learn to live with that tension.
The painting is a mirror that reflects who one is at the moment. The images and colours form the archetypal background to one's life and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. By 'archetypal background ', I refer to the universal symbols and patterns that are part of the collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung. These archetypes, such as the hero, the mother, and the shadow, provide a framework for understanding and interpreting our experiences. The grid on which one is built enables one to battle questions like chaos and control, black and white, dark and light, creation and destruction, duality and unity – the unification of opposites. These questions flow from out of the paint into being itself, so the work is both a meditation on life and a meditation where painting becomes an extension of the psyche: one’s battle with one’s soul.
My paintings reflect life—childbirth, motherhood, fatherhood, relationships, meditation, nature, sexuality, loving, rebirth, and dying. They also reflect the temporal, spiritual, and archetypal structure of the psyche and the images it provides as we move through life, its seasons, and its celebrations. This transformative power of creativity can empower us to navigate life's complexities with hope and resilience.
Painting puts me in touch with my feelings—and this is a universal language. For example, falling in love is a sense that we think is all ours and can afflict anyone. We all have suffered from the same symptoms—it is an emotional truth that we can share. Instead of saying I am in love, perhaps one could say there is love between us. How do we manage to keep it there? Some of the pictures try to capture these emotions.
It is therapeutic to give an image to the emotion that one is expressing so that, simultaneously, one is working on one’s feelings and differentiating and making them particular to oneself so that one is using the work as a discipline that is helping one to define and differentiate oneself and also to get to the core of one's life so that one can reflect on one's anger, desire, attachment and so on so that one sees oneself as being possessed by these emotions rather than being the possessor of them. One no longer identifies with them. So that one can give them up as they pass through one. However, some may last a significant number of years! The work does not happen overnight.
The created image gives a particular understanding of the emotions one is feeling. Sometimes, we discover and develop feelings we did not know existed. Image-making refines our feelings and makes the unconscious visible.
Being a member of any religion involves one entering into the psychological development of the group. Our journey with the group through its rituals joins us to the collective imagination as it journeys from birth towards death. It allows us to take on an imaginative identity based on the cultural history and the metaphors within this history. These metaphors communicate different psychological realities – from the cradle to the grave and beyond. We live, therefore, in a collective framework – and move within this framework, within the group, in a symbolic way and largely unconscious of the metaphors behind everyday life. We take those for granted; we accept them as reality. And through this identification, we live a symbolic life. We live in the imagination.
What happens when these cultural frameworks are removed by assimilation or conflation, where the “gods” of the dominant culture are merged with those of the weaker one? Or simply through a lack of religious education or unsuccessful initiation into the cultural symbols of the time? This creates a situation where the symbols do not sink into the unconscious, so people cannot live a symbolic life because they are alienated from the rules and regulations of the religion, which is organised in a particular way. Does this mean they are reduced to a life of materialism and deprived of a holy/ whole or symbolic life? I argue that the psyche will create movement and provide various symbols to lead and guide us. Instead of this being a collective path, one that is shared, it then becomes a journey taken in isolation and is personal to the extent that its images arise of their own accord – sometimes, these fit into collective metaphors and at other times, they do not. Sometimes, if enough people share them, somebody may form a new religion or cult.
The image of the spirit imprisoned in the world's darkness, in a state of relative unconsciousness, must be redeemed. This leads to the search for a uniting symbol. The imagination's sole search is to find this. When I look back at the paintings, most of the pictures reflect the image that united me at the time, created a sense of wholeness, refined my feelings, and gave me an understanding of what lay behind the experience, the instinct that was uppermost in my life. Rosie Phipps Oxford 2005